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An emerging stream of research has identified critical events as spikes in societal interest that increase public attention to firm behavior and can function as exogenous triggers for change. With respect to misconduct, firms vary considerably in how they respond to critical events, and for a visible change in their undesirable behavior to transpire, there needs to be ongoing accumulation of work by social-control agents. While social-control agents are often boundedly rational in their decision-making, most studies have overlooked the ability of critical events to restrict or redirect collective attention among such agents. Drawing on the case of a regulatory agency’s enforcement actions against violations of anti-money laundering regulations by three European banks, we investigate the influence of critical events on social-control agents’ enforcement behavior. This study achieves two goals: first, we identify three types of fieldwide critical events that influence social-control agents’ behavior, and second, we demonstrate that these events may shape the regulatory environment in which firms operate, thus allowing for different organizational responses to enforcement actions. Our findings contribute to the literature on critical events and organizational misconduct.

In this paper, we investigate the process by which social control agents define wrongdoing over time and the principles they employ in drawing the boundary between right and wrong. We empirically examine how Italian state actors sought over four decades to categorize behaviors in the so-called “gray area,” i.e., the conduct of individuals supportive of the mafia organization Cosa Nostra and its criminal aims, but not members of the organization. Based on an archival analysis of texts produced since the 1960s, we reconstruct how state actors started from a preliminary definition of wrongdoing, moved to stigmatize the behaviors in question on moral grounds, and ultimately criminalized them with legal sanctions. We conceptualize the main principles behind this evolving categorization as intentionality of conduct, freedom of choice, and scope of harm. The paper contributes to the debate on the factors and conditions shaping the definition of wrongdoing over time and the contribution that social control agents provide to this aim.

Chapter X of The Social System is often cited as the “charter” for the specialty field of medical sociology. A notable feature of its analysis is the argument that the physician is an agent of social control in relation to the patient. This argument grounds the application to medical practice of Parsons’ general conception that social control is an aspect of all social relationships. Parsons started by addressing the situation of a patient who assumes the sick role and then becomes the patient of a physician. The sick role involves a suspension of at least some of the performance expectations associated with a person's everyday social life, such as expectations of working productively at one's job, attending the meeting of a civic association, or caring for one's family members. But in assuming the sick role, an individual encounters new expectations that he or she should try to get well. For minor illnesses this may involve only resting, drinking fluids, and avoiding stress. For more serious illnesses, given our culture's valuation of scientific medicine, it typically involves placing oneself in the care of a physician. It then becomes the physician's duty to offer treatment and guidance to restore one's health and enable one to return to meet expectations of everyday roles. Thus the physician becomes an agent of social control.

The United States has an uncomfortable relationship with pleasure. Cultural ambivalence is evident in discourses surrounding pleasure and the labeling and treatment of those who act on their desires. Pleasure seeking, generally understood in moral terms, is often medicalized and criminalized (as in the case of pregnancy prevention and drug use), placing questions of how to manage pleasure under the purview of medical and legal actors. At the macrolevel, institutions police pleasure via rules, patterns of action, and logics, while at the microlevel, frontline workers police pleasure via daily decisions about resource distribution. This chapter develops a sociolegal framework for understanding the social control of pleasure by analyzing how two institutions – medicine and criminal justice – police pleasure institutionally and interactionally. Conceptualizing medicine and criminal justice as paternalistic institutions acting as arbiters of morality, I demonstrate how these institutions address two cases of pleasure seeking – drug use and sex – by drawing examples from contemporary drug and reproductive health policy. Section one highlights shared institutional mechanisms of policing pleasure across medicine and criminal justice such as categorization, allocation of professional power, and the structuring of legitimate consequences for pleasure seeking. Section two demonstrates how frontline workers in each field act as moral gatekeepers as they interpret and construct institutional imperatives while exercising discretion about resource allocation in daily practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understanding institutional and interactional policing of pleasure informs sociolegal scholarship about the relationships between medicine and criminal justice and the mechanisms by which institutions and frontline workers act as agents of social control.

Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.

When organizations engage in misconduct, social control agents play a crucial role in sanctioning them to show the enforcement of societal norms and reduce the risk of future deviance. We study the interaction between the government and the media, two key social control agents, in the evaluation organizational misconduct. While past work has focused on the influence of the media on the government, we theorize the influence of the government on the media. The government is a social control agent with supreme formal authority to punish misconduct, and thus its actions are of particular interest to the media as they form evaluations of misbehaving organizations. However, the government, tied by conflicting demands, sometimes turns a blind eye to misconduct and supports misbehaving organizations for the greater societal good, instead of punishing them. How is the media’s perception of misbehaving organizations affected by such government actions? We explore this question by looking at the case of the 2008 government bailout of investment banks in the United States, after those were caught red-handed for their involvement in the sub-prime financial crisis. Carrying out a content analysis of newspaper reporting (2007–2011), we show that the negative perception of investment banks and their misconduct is attenuated when they receive government support. Our work contributes to the emerging literature on the social construction of organizational misconduct and illuminates the interaction between government and media in the evaluation of behavior as organizational misconduct.

This chapter examines the effects of covert forms of social control on social movement participants. Current social science literature addresses the effect of surveillance on social movement organizations, but stops short of exploring the experience of surveillance for political activists. We begin by reviewing how state social control has been incorporated into paradigmatic social movement models. Drawing on examples from the FBI's counterintelligence programs and the growing literature emphasizing the emotional components of social movement mobilization processes, we then demonstrate the range of direct and indirect costs exerted by social control agents on both organizational and individual targets.

Organizational wrongdoing is still very much prevalent in today’s society. Traditional and social media are full of examples of organizations engaging in unethical or illegal behavior. While it is difficult – if not impossible – to establish whether the ever-increasing number of reported cases of wrongdoing is due to an actual increase in the phenomenon (objectivist view of wrongdoing) or to more attention being paid to it (social-constructivist view of wrongdoing), the fact remains that organizational wrongdoing seems to have become the norm rather than an exception in our everyday life. This is concerning, as organizational wrongdoing tends to undermine trust in fundamental institutions, such as the Market, the State, Religion, and Law, and may lead to them being replaced by other – sometimes less desirable – institutions or create an “institutional void.” Because of its potential impact on established institutions, organizational wrongdoing deserves to be closely monitored and further examined. This volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations is an attempt to draw attention to the theoretical and empirical relevance of the topic, consolidate and extend the knowledge accumulated in this area of research, and highlight potential direction for future research. The volume explores in particular the definitions and antecedents of organizational wrongdoing.

This chapter explores social control from a theoretical perspective based on rhetoric. The chapter highlights three theorists whose insights enable us to see how social control functions. First, the chapter examines the work of Michel Foucault, in particular his notions of power, as they relate to the way social control operates. Second, key concepts from Antonio Gramsci reveal the ways in which social control discursively sustains its hold on society. Finally, the work of Louis Althusser is discussed, especially his notion of interpellation, as it yields a way to view how ideology and social control are interrelated rhetorically. By focusing on the rhetoric of social control, we can gain an understanding of how social control operates and is used by particular agents in society.

“The Need to Disrupt Social Control” discusses three examples: sexual assault, civil rights, and state security, and how all three involve social control forces that promote or permit the oppression of individuals, groups, and societies. Amentahru Wahlrab, Sarah M. Sass, and Robert Edward Sterken Jr. briefly provide examples of how social control can be disrupted including #MeToo (sexual assault), the American Civil Rights Movement (civil rights), and the Arab Spring (authoritarian regimes) to illustrate how social control has been disrupted in these areas. The chapter illustrates how patriarchal norms allow for sexual assault by those with power within contexts, such as Hollywood, academia, business, and politics. Sexual assault survivors and bystanders often do not report instances of assault due to informal social norms permitting such actions and fear of personal and professional harm.

On a different level, the jail in the American south was one of the most feared institutions for African Americans. It was not uncommon for an African American to never return from what would be a night in the “drunk tank” for a white person. Black Americans stayed “in their place” due to the threat of the jail cell. Finally, the chapter details how tyrants use the full weight of state security forces, including the police and the military, to maintain their control. Fear of security forces is routinely encouraged by arrests, torture, and even disappearance (of people) at the hands of the security forces. “The Need to Disrupt Social Control” concludes that in these cases, social control maintains an oppressive order of some kind, thus social control is understood as a potential negative.